One of the main reasons for writing a new data processing software was to address some of the frustrating issues I faced with Quantum.

I wanted to get rid of the 200 chars per line restriction - a source of many core dumps and unexpected behavious

Edit restriction like a prefined limit on the number of edit statements

Label number for loops and branching statements - that too an upper bound of 500 statements

Subroutines could not be called from a loop

Weak type checking

Record length limit of 32768

... the list goes on

Layout independence from column numbers. Ideally I would like the data map to be embedded in the data file. The burden of dealing with column nos should rest on the compiler not the DP

There is a lot of scope for computer assisted table checking. For example while processing data - we have a raw column number - it is easy to program a function to check the base of the table vs non-blank holecounts. In fact I had this working in a interpreter prior to the compiler.